by Sandi Tan
“The body of the forty-year-old homeowner, Beverly Joon Park, was found in the wreckage.” In an old photo, Mrs. Park smiled demurely outside All-Friends church. “She is survived by two teenage daughters . . .” Day-after shots of the neighborhood.
“Investigators believe arson is the cause. An unidentified young male found loitering in the area has been taken into custody. The motive for the crime remains unclear . . .” Repeat of cellphone video footage. Shots of firemen working through the singed, damaged interior.
“The eighty-year-old three-bedroom house had just come on the market. Experts estimate that the house, given its architectural heritage, would have drawn bids above its $545,000 asking price, more than double its value just two years ago. There is no comment at this time from the family’s realtor.” Shot of fire-damaged open house sign.
“That’s repellent,” said Mary-Sue. “This is a culture with more sympathy for the real estate than for that poor dead woman. Or her orphan girls. You’ve got to wonder about terrorism. It is Christmas. We are Santa Claus Lane.”
“Mom, please stop,” said Kate. “Not everything is terrorism.”
“You said yourself the boy looked Arabic.”
“I said he was a dark-haired, Mediterranean type. I was careful not to say words like Arabic because I know how hysterical people can get.”
As she said this, she felt a knocking from deep within her body. Someone was kicking the walls of her womb, trying to get her attention. Up to now, the baby had been very good about not moving around unnecessarily. This sensation was new. She pictured her fetus rappelling up the interior of her ribcage, stepping over the spongy honeycombs that were her lungs, getting a toehold on her breastplate so it could advance toward the gauzy ray of light that had appeared above like a chimera, just out of finger reach. Oh wait, wrong end.
“You too, stop.” She patted her belly. “I know you’re there. I know you’re there.”
Raymond surveyed his flourishing camellia bushes. Each bloom resembled a snowman’s meaty white fist—if snowmen had fists. He chose the three best and snipped them off. It was astounding how their presence softened the angularity of that mahogany dining table. He’d never fully grasped how severe and grim his things were until the girls arrived. The first week, neither of them had dared place their elbows on the table. Then he realized—his furniture scared them.
As Rosemary and Mira grew more comfortable, they flopped around the living room like the girls in a Balthus painting—hems up, guard down, as they perused his novels, getting to know him tale-by-tale. He liked how relaxed the couch looked with its cushions dented by their bodies, the poised dimples in the chenille pillows lost to rumpled disarray. The paint chipping off the upstairs bathroom door, caused by the girls’ thoughtless kicks and bumps, might have been described by Pottery Barn as an “artisanal shabby chic.” And it was this type of aesthetic reasoning that helped him justify to himself why he was harboring the girls, why he felt so kindly toward them.
What began as a handshake grew into mutual appreciation. He didn’t want the girls to leave. With the young refugees in his care, his home took on an improvisational candor—shoes everywhere, socks everywhere, ponytail scrunchies abandoned in surprising crevices. Now that the bullet graze on Mira’s arm had almost completely healed—leaving behind a scenic scar that she proudly showed off—there were used Band-Aids everywhere, triumphal souvenirs of her recovery.
Two kind-faced women from Child Services showed up, telling the girls that their father’s cousin in Koreatown was the state’s “preferred resource” for their “placement” now that they were orphaned, but also that this cousin had not been responsive to discussions, and his home could not be “properly assessed for suitability.” Raymond told them that the girls had assured him that their relatives had no interest in taking them, and that he would harbor them until they chose otherwise, and yes, that he understood this arrangement was dependent on paperwork he was only too happy to fill out with the help of his lawyer.
When the girls ambled in for their interview with the social workers, they looked utterly at home. They called Raymond “Uncle Ray” and snacked messily on home-baked muffins, dropping numerous crumbs into the gaps between sofa cushions. They’d lived their entire lives on Santa Claus Lane and couldn’t imagine a future elsewhere. They were star students at their magnet school. They did not want any further disruption.
Through his flame-eaten privet, after the interrogators left, Raymond gazed over at what remained of the Park house. With its top gone and interior eviscerated, what remained resembled medieval fortress ruins. What could have possessed a fifteen-year-old boy to cover the place with gasoline and then torch it, if in fact he did do it? The suspect, Arik Kistorian, a schoolmate of Rosemary’s, was evidently the same bruised boy who’d attacked him that night. He’d seen the boy at the police station when he took the girls in for questioning and was struck, even under harsh fluorescent lighting, by his sullen beauty. He reminded Raymond of many boys he’d known and held. But he also sensed something damaged in this one, an aggrieved incomprehension at the workings of the world—as if this crime had been done to him and not the other way around. The arson investigation proved challenging. Arik’s fingerprints could not be found on the site of the blast; further, his mother—a professional laundress—had cleaned his clothes and his room before detectives arrived at their home. But the cops remained interested in him. Each time Raymond brought up Arik, even obliquely, he felt Rosemary grow more distant, more secretive. Finally, he let it drop.
Two days after the blast, on an early Saturday morning, he’d watched an ungainly Korean woman scurry out of her hatchback and pull, with scowling effort, the singed open house sign out of the ground. She broke one of her high heels in doing so, and limped angrily back to her car. Later that day, scavengers arrived, including one in a dusty Chevy Suburban with Arizona plates. People he’d never dreamt he’d see in the neighborhood showed up—sun-drunk Orange County surfers, Hawaiian shirt–wearing fatties straight out of a Far Side panel, an Indian family in rubber thongs, Latino fast-food workers still in uniform. They dived into the site like veterans of archaeological digs, emerging ash-nosed and muddy-kneed with TV remotes, shoes, stock pots, even a gold necklace. Each find would elicit a bigger whoop from the lone female who was, invariably, the designated lookout. Afterward, they leapt into their vehicles covered in dirt, the thrill of free stuff outweighing all matters of hygiene, and took off.
And as far as he could tell, the girls had no interest in anything related to their former home. Neither of them brought up the loss in seriousness or in jest; neither peeked through the curtains for ringside views. Not once did they express feeling for their mother, at least not in front of him. Whenever they drove by their old house, the girls pretended to be distracted by their cellphones. Even by his standards, that seemed repressed. When he questioned them about their wishes, the girls said they wanted to stay on with him until they were older and more independent. This frightened him—he worried about his emotional and financial resources. He spent hours on the phone with his lawyer discussing how best to proceed—legal guardianship was complicated, but possible, if he wanted to pursue it. Training to be a county-certified foster parent (with “psycho-social testing” he was sure to fail) sounded far less mouthwatering. The bulldozers would eventually come and raze all traces of plaster and blood next door; such was the history of real estate. He could just as easily be rid of the girls, his lawyer reminded him. He had absolutely no obligation to take them.
The girls started back at school, and Rosemary was pleasantly surprised to learn that Bryce Zehring no longer taught there. When it made the news that he had been located in Ireland, where he’d fled to escape a statutory rape charge, she felt a ghost tug of responsibility for her own silence. After Alicia Hwang started pointing fingers, the LA Times uncovered that Mr. Z had been fired from a co-ed boarding school in Boston two year
s prior for “improper conduct” with a female student. In the same article, a Nandita Singh of Mount Curve was quoted as saying she had complained to the police multiple times about him spying on her from his car. A “deeply unsavory character,” she called him. Yet he couldn’t be classified a stalker because he never got out of his car, never did anything outwardly worrying. He simply lurked. When the cops did nothing, her husband bought the family a bull terrier to stand guard.
Rosemary was now more curious than ever about what had been in that red backpack. Were they things, like the props and his playscript, say, that would prove the best of him, or things that would prove the worst? Now she’d never know. Arik, in his funny way, had made her darkest wish come true. Maybe that was the price of not knowing. They would forever be bound, even if they never spoke again.
She pulled out her phone and stared at the electric rose Mr. Z had sent her.
@};--
The wonderful thing about electric roses was they didn’t fade, and their thorns couldn’t scratch you when you put them in the trash. She deleted Mr. Z from her address book, as she had done Arik.
Barely two months in and the girls had become many things to Raymond—call screener, door answerer, proofreader (he’d begun outlining a new novel), foot rubber, bath runner, remote-control finder, light-bulb changer, bartender, typist, fan club, cook. They’d reeled him in, hook, line and sinker. He let them drink, on weekends—it was the least he could do.
Once, after a jubilant, mimosa-fueled breakfast, he pulled Mira aside and asked her why she’d stalked him so vehemently, masquerading as a naked daemon.
“What are you talking about?”
There was something in the way she said this, the confusion knitting her brow, that told him she wasn’t playing. This child could not lie. A shiver passed through him—first terror, then something better.
She saw his secret smile. She read his creases like a book. “What is it?”
“Nothing. A simple case of mistaken identity.”
Raymond had had a ghost. It made total literary sense. In the yard, as he watered his camellias, a flutter of dark wings passed over his head. He felt shadows moving swiftly over him like a hundred miniature screeching warplanes. He calmly stood his ground. No longer would he question casual brushes with the supernatural; he would stay and he would watch.
The flying pests convened in a black cluster midair, squawking plans to swarm upon some rendezvous spot. They swooped down to the Parks’ backyard, gathering at the only thing that had escaped the blast—that hideous blue couch. When the flurry of wings died down, Raymond saw them for what they were—the feral green parrots he’d heard so much about. The lore had them pegged as wisecracking macaws who blew from perch to snazzy perch. But they were just basic little birds, mere budgerigars if not for the crimson patches on their foreheads. Parvenus of the parrot world! They covered the raggedy couch in a shroud of pea green and immediately pecked and scratched, as if servicing an itchy rhinoceros. Those nicks and tears—they’d been the work of these winged devils! Their little yellow beaks emerged from the cushions white with fluff. Some bit off more than they could chew and the parts they couldn’t take with them fell like tired snow onto the ground. Raymond finally understood birdwatching.
“Ray,” came Rosemary’s voice.
Raymond turned around and read the terror in her eyes. “There’s a phone call for you,” she said.
In addition to being weaned off “Mr. van der Holt,” the girls had been trained to stonewall unimportant calls. Rosemary did not have to say anything else. Raymond stumbled in place, then started back indoors, pointing absently at the birds to divert her eyes from his anxious face.
She watched him vanish inside the house and heard him ram his foot against the base of the stairs, stifle a cry, recompose himself, and pick up the receiver.
“Good evening, nurse.”
At the funeral in a small church outside New Haven, he chose silence. He had nothing to share with this roomful of strangers. An elderly female relative from Ann Arbor he’d never met before gave a eulogy about his father’s early life and the Depression summers they’d spent together on a Kansas farm. That was where his dad had been “truly in his element,” as she put it—he’d once saved a brown calf from drowning in the creek. She twice alluded to his “genial, upbeat attitude to life” despite his having been “robbed of a childhood” due to two alcoholic parents and poverty in general. She then quoted a line from St. Augustine’s Confessions that brought a tear to Raymond’s eye: “The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die.”
This cousin spoke with the authority and regret of a former sweetheart. But well aware that she was addressing a roomful of people who’d never known the man before he was old, she kept her speech to a brief ten minutes. When the whole room realized that no one else had been scheduled to speak, a couple of caregivers from Dartmoor threw in a few kind words just to extend the ceremony. Their contributions were heartfelt, but hazy—“he was a joy to be with,” “funny and warm,” “we’ll all miss him dearly.”
Raymond felt as if he’d walked into a memorial honoring somebody else. He was glad that he had the girls with him, even if he had ignored the paperwork from Social Services that would legally let him take them out of state. The girls weren’t going to rat him out. In the pew, Mira held on to his arm, massaging it to make sure his blood was still circulating because one might have doubted it from looking at his face.
“You’re shaking,” she whispered.
The elderly Ann Arbor relative avoided Raymond at the reception that followed—not recognizing him, he hoped. She spoke instead to residents from the retirement home who treated her as if she were the grieving widow. He watched her from across the room. He saw how she made a hasty exit after spilling a cup of coffee down her crocheted vest.
A middle-aged couple dressed like Midwestern academics came up to the table where Raymond and the girls were seated. They had a small Asian girl with them, about six years old. The man possessed an eager but awkward willingness to make friends.
“Are they from China, too?” were his first words to Raymond, his head nodding enthusiastically. “Our Lily’s from Sichuan Province, in the southwest. She’s got a natural taste for spicy food.”
“No, no.” Raymond smiled, tiredly. “Mine are from Southern California. No taste whatsoever.”
“Did you know Mr. van der Holt well?”
“Turns out, not really.”
That night, Raymond treated himself and the girls to dinner in Manhattan. Hail and sleet meant that even without calling ahead, they landed a table at a jewel box tapas spot in the West Village that he’d read great things about.
“We’re all orphans now.” He clasped their hands tightly. “We have to be kind to ourselves.”
That night, they feasted on tripe salad, steamed cockles, grilled skate and hare. Hard snow pellets blew down outside the windows. The girls stared out, rapt; neither had been in a snowstorm. He savored the moment. New York’s still got it. The skyline has been altered but it was still a place you could take out-of-towners and have them wowed.
After dinner, he dropped the girls back at their hotel and went on his own to see Lena Ozova, who’d had a stroke. Her Murray Hill penthouse was everything he recalled from old soirees to celebrate writers she loved more than him—book-lined, silk-carpeted, pockmarked with cheesy little Hogarth engravings. But the old witch, alas, was not the same. Suddenly quite feeble, she moved around in a wheelchair, her musical snarl reduced to a rasp. He had a lousy feeling that the live-in help, a sulky young woman from the Ukraine, wasn’t as kind to her as she was paid to be; she sat in the room the whole time, looking aggressively bored. The Ukrainian ran the house how she saw fit, heating it up like a Soviet sauna and filling the air with the acid
tang of artificial pine. Raymond gulped down the glass of lukewarm water she handed to him and said goodbye to Lena sooner than he wished, or expected to. He left knowing he’d never see his old friend alive again, shamed that he’d let himself be intimidated by an unpleasant maid.
On the plane back to Los Angeles, Raymond at last cracked a Xanax smile. This didn’t go unnoticed by his hawk-eyed favorite.
“What? Tell me,” Mira said, looking up from his novel Black Grave.
“I never thought I’d be friends with anyone born in the eighties.”
“But you’re not. We were born in the nineties.”
“Ah. So I was right after all.”
When they got home—another surprise. A thick envelope arrived from a Koreatown lawyer. Mr. Park’s relatives had decided to claim the girls after all, and they would go to court for their property. It was abundantly clear this was more about real estate than blood. Mira ran up to her room in tears. Rosemary went to the den with a stoical stillness and began watching a documentary about meerkats.
“It’ll be all right,” Raymond assured his older girl. “We’ve got a Hollywood divorce lawyer.”
After another endless phone call with his friend Ron, the retired, half-deaf divorce lawyer, Raymond found Mary-Sue at his door, unsolicited, with a store-bought lemon meringue pie. She told him what a good thing she thought he was doing, taking in those poor girls, and then prattled on, her hand on his arm, about how adoption was going to change his life. Platitudes. Once she was gone, the pie went flying into the trash.
Those Koreatown relatives the girls hardly knew—were they worth his sweat? Whenever he felt like throwing in the towel, he reminded himself: should he ever be found lying in a pool of his own vomit, Rosemary would be efficient about calling 911. She was observant, industrious, polite. Should he ever need cheering up, Mira was there. All those spontaneous cartwheels she spun on the supermarket floor, she was his little dust devil, his nonstop whirligig. No, he couldn’t lose that. He’d fight, at least for now.